Comment by saberience | Hacker News Reader

Comment by saberience | Hacker News Reader

My general take on most vibe coding projects ("Hey, look, I built this over the weekend"), is general dismissiveness. Mostly because of the effort required, i.e. why should I care about something that someone did with almost zero effort, a few prompts?

If someone tells me they ran a marathon, I'm impressed because I know that took work. If someone tells me they jogged 100 meters, I don't care at all (unless they were previously crippled or morbidly obese etc.).

I think there are just a ton of none-engineers who are super hyped right now that they built something/anything, but don't have any internal benchmark or calibration about what is actually "good" or "impressive" when it comes to software, since they never built anything before, with AI or otherwise.

Even roughly a year ago, I made a 3D shooting game over an evening using Claude and never bothered sharing it because it seemed like pure slop and far too easy to brag about. Now my bar for being "impressed" by software is incredibly high, knowing you can few shot almost anything imaginable in a few hours.

I struggle with this feeling as well, a huge part of the Maker movement was excitement around people building and importantly learning how to build thing. Iterating and improving each time is a pretty common thread you'll see throughout the community. It's hard to have someone show you a thing they generated instead of made and to feel the same way. Yes, they played a part in that thing existing, and part of that person is reflected in the output, but I don't think most Makers would say the final output is goal, so what's there to be excited about?

It's hard to not be dismissive or gate-keeping with this stuff, my goal isn't to discourage anyone or to fight against the lower barriers to entry, but it's simply a different thing when someone prompts a private AI model to make a thing in an hour.

Do people build to impress with an implementation that no one cares about really? Or to share the end product?

I think now you are freed up to make a shooter that people will actually want to play. Or at least attempt it.

We probably need to come to terms with the idea that no one cares about those details. Really, 2 years ago no one would have cared about your hand crafted 3d shooter either I think.

It doesn't matter, neither of those scenarios makes the effort impressive in this case. The vibe coded thing might even be useful - that does not make it impressive though. Effort does.

This is what I think a lot of the people who advocate for 'AI generated images being art' don't get. There's no effort or intentionality into what's being created; it has the look and appearance of 'polished art' (that breaks down when you look closer) but behind it is nothing.

It's also why AI generated code is a nightmare to read and deal with, because the intention behind the code does not exist. Code outputting malformed input because it was a requirement two years ago, a developer throwing in a quick hack to fix a problem, these are things you can divine and figure out from everything else.

This is the myth of the Protestant work ethic; that effort matters, not outcome.

> The vibe coded thing might even be useful - that does not make it impressive though.

Then "impressive" shouldn't even be the benchmark. If someone gifted me $10K, I'm not going to care if they earned it in a competition or won it in a lottery. Value is value. I'm gratefully accepting it and not being snobby about it. I couldn't care less about how "impressive" anything is if it's useful to me.

But "impressive" is not a benchmark, it's a human reaction. I care about being impressed, as do many people.

> I think now you are freed up to make a shooter that people will actually want to play. Or at least attempt it.

Taking this to an extreme, let's say vibe coding becomes real enough, and frictionless enough, that you can prompt a first person shooter into existence in a few minutes or hours.

If/when this becomes true, nobody will want to play your shooter. You'll share your shooter with people and if they care at all about shooters, they'll just go prompt their favorite AI tool and conjure their own into existence.

Admittedly this is a bit extreme, and we aren't there yet. But I've thought about this in relation to art, and how some people now go "well, this empowers people who didn't know how to make a movie/cartoon/painting/game, it's empowering and democratizing". But in my mind, art is a form of communication between humans. Without the exchange between humans, art cannot exist. If all of us are each lost in our own AI-powered projects, and if anything can be easily conjured out of thin air, then why bother with the next person's art project (game or whatever)? I don't care about your game, let me make my own in a few minutes.

I'm thinking about potential counterpoints: ah, yes, but it's about "ideas". While we can both make our ideas reality, my ideas are more inventive, so my AI-powered projects are more appealing. I'm not convinced about this; I think slop will dominate and invade public spaces, but also... why draw the line at ideas? Why is "skill with a pencil" replaceable with AI-slop, but ideas aren't? Ideas are often overrated, what matters is execution, anyway.

Yeah - It feels similar to me.

Why share something that anyone can just “prompt into existence”?

Architecture wise and also just from a code quality perspective I have yet to encounter AI generated code that passes my quality bar.

Vibe coding is great for a PoC but we usually do a full rewrite until it’s production ready.

————

Might be a hot take, but I don’t think people who can’t code should ship or publish code. They should learn to do it and AI can be a resource on the way.. but you should understand the code you “produce”. In the end it’s yours, not the AIs code.

> Architecture wise and also just from a code quality perspective I have yet to encounter AI generated code that passes my quality bar.

You should consider trying to using AI in a programming language that scores high in the AutoCoderBenchmark.

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